Design Patterns and Change Proneness: An Examination of Five Evolving Systems

Design patterns are recognized, named solutions to common design problems. The use of the most commonly referenced design patterns should promote adaptable and reusable program code. When a system evolves, changes to code involving a design pattern should, in theory, consist of creating new concrete classes that are extensions or subclasses of previously existing classes. Changes should not, in theory, involve direct modifications to the classes in prior versions that play roles in a design patterns. We studied five systems, three proprietary systems and two open source systems, to identify the observable effects of the use of design patterns in early versions on changes that occur as the systems evolve. In four of the five systems, pattern classes are more rather than less change prone. Pattern classes in one of the systems were less change prone. These results held up after normalizing for the effect of class size — larger classes are more change prone in two of the five systems. These results provide insight into how design patterns are actually used, and should help us to learn to develop software designs that are more easily adapted.